DVD Review: A White, White Day

STUDIO: Film Movement | DIRECTOR: Hlynur Pálmason | CAST: Ingvar Sigurdsson, Ida Mekkin Hlynsdóttir, Sara Dogg Asgeirsdóttir, Bjorn Ingi Hilmarsson
RELEASE DATE: Available now | PRICE: DVD $19.99
BONUSES: bonus short film by Hlynur Pálmason
SPECS: NR | 109 min. | Foreign language drama thriller | 2.35:1 widescreen | 5.1 Surround/2.0 stereo | Icelandic with English subtitles

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie  | Audio  | Video  | Overall 

A White, White Day takes it cue from its setting: a remote Icelandic town where everyone probably knows more about each other than a New Yorker might know about his own next door neighbor. It’s here that a semi-retired, widowed policeman begins to suspect that a fellow local may have been having his affair with his late wife, who was killed a couple of years earlier in a mysterious car accident. Following the spark of his initial suspicion, the widower becomes consumed with finding out the truth, setting off a chain of increasingly uncomfortable and dangerous actions that may prove to be not only his own undoing, but that of his fellow law enforcers, his wife’s possible lover, his daughter and even his granddaughter.

The second feature by Iceland’s Hylnur Palmason following the 2017 sibling odyssey Winter Brothers, A White, White Day is the latest sampling of Nordic noir that film critics and movie geeks have been drooling over since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo flicks and TV’s chilly The Killing, The Bridge and, most recently, Finland’s Bordertown, arrived on this side of the Atlantic.

A carefully crafted take on a familiar tale that smartly slips into the revenge thriller template while still offering something fresh and unpredictable, Pálmason’s bone-dry direction, a wintry leading turn by Ingvar Sigurdsson as the man taken over by late-stage anger and jealousy, a score of discordant strings and Iceland’s naturally imposing landscapes are the leading components in this increasingly tense tale. And it all comes to a climax with the outstanding use of a great Leonard Cohen song.

Also on the DVD is Pálmason’s 2014 film Seven Boats, an evocative black-and-white short about a man lost at sea.